Hiu Tung Yip is a practising researcher from Hong Kong with a background in visual design and jewellery-making. She holds an MRes in Arts and Humanities, an MA in Jewellery and Metal from the Royal College of Art, and an MFA in Jewellery from Alchimia Contemporary Jewellery School in Florence, Italy. She has also received the Arts & Crafts Design Merit Award in 2018.

In Hiu Tung’s PhD practice-research, she explores the meanings of cuteness within the complex nature of familial care, as she navigates the cultural narratives of familial bonds against embodied experiences.  

This research develops existing theories of cuteness by conceptualising it as an understanding of care from an autoethnographic perspective. For Hiu Tung, who grew up in a Hong Kong household, love was mainly expressed in material provisions and acts of service. Cute objects — given as gifts, conditional rewards, and sources of comfort — carried with them high parental expectations.

Cuteness is ingrained in how she lastingly understands care and discipline; it became a sensibility that permeated beyond conventional cute objects and its affective influences beyond childhood. These understandings of cuteness and care are inseparable from the cultural experience of ‘tough love’ and the norm of shying away from emotional openness. Investigating cute objects’ roles in familial relationships thus provides a way to probe the difficulties in communicating emotions within these dynamics.

Hiu Tung also explores how familial care can be perceived and remembered through specific objects, events, and sayings. In her practice of writing and wearable sculpture, medical ointments that symbolise silent worries and good wishes of parents and caretakers, as well as soft toys that embody tender affection and high parental expectations, are used to unpack unprocessed cultural narratives.

Hiu Tung’s works have been exhibited internationally in shows such as Munich Jewellery Week (Munich, 2024), London X Tokyo Jewellery Cultural Exchange (London, 2020), Collect Art Fair (London, 2019), and CODA Paper Art (Apeldoorn, 2019).